For Dinner: A Lokiite stew, hot, warm, and nutritious.Mood: Pleasantly exhausted.
Written in the Year of our Lord 3580, April 2nd,
Tuesday night.Location: In the midst of the Conqueror mountains, west of Vagnar,
on the continent of Laufey.

Glutheim woke me up the next morning. "They say there
is fine skiing on a resort on a nearby mourntain. Would you like to see
it? You skiied on Havlinn, I seem to remember..."

"Sure. Although my conventions for skiing might
be different from yours."

Actually, they weren't. There were only so
many ways to travel on snow with two sticks attached to your feet, and
the few differences between the skis I was used to and Lokiite skis were
very few. The scene on the skislopes looked very like any scene on any
human colony world...although the red treeforms below the snow took some
getting used to.

The best skiers were the two soldiers,
who took turns skiing with us while the other guarded the party. I was
interested in how they used their linkchains between their wrists and ankles
for balance. My lack of same was viewed with similar interest by them.
We had different skiing "styles" as it were.

Still, the snows were the same, the
slopes were the same....the slightly higher gravity packed the snow in
higher, but I'm used to that. No bugs annoyed me, it being too cold for
that The air pressure dropped even faster with height than
it would have on Earth. But there were the same frosty plumes of
breath, the same biting cold, as one would expect from a good skislope
at home.

I even got into a snowfight with Tiafen's
kid. I know a priest shouldn't indulge in such foolish, frivolous
fights; that's probably why I love 'em so. The soldier on duty did
turn her weapon in our direction, until she figured out what we were doing.

I tried to build a snowman later, but they
just shrugged. "That's supposed to be a human?" They had a point.

We went back to the lodge, and there
enjoyed a stew of many different vegetables and meats from their world,
very nutritious (after my nanoprocessor was through with it) after spending
all day in the cold snow.

The nanoprocessor is large enough for
a large plate, and nanomachines dive in and eliminate anything which would
hurt me or poison me to ingest. It takes about fifteen minutes, but I'm
a fast eater. (Too fast. My mother used to lecture me about that...)
I catch up.

For a short while it was easy to forget that
I was the only human within miles, perhaps within hundreds of miles....in
the rush of speeding down a hill.